Point of Contraction

I wrote this in February, and a lot has changed since then, but it's still part of my story.

Submitted:May 3, 2013
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It was quiet on campus as I left the cafeteria. A cold wind
whipped past me, flinging up gritty brown dust on its feverish
sprint to the forest. Most of my peers had gone to practice, or
maybe were still eating, or perhaps had gone somewhere to hand
out - I didn't really know. I never knew what people did between
the end of school and the start of curfew. Come to think of it,
no one knew what I did either.

All I really felt as I trudged up the slanted, unpaved road was
the cold. Kijabe is always cold. My fingers and toes were numb -
they never were anything else; my sandals were covered in dirt;
my worn green jacket offered minimal protection from the wind;
short blonde hair flung itself about my face. I squinted against
it. And somewhere, deep inside me, an icy fury had taken
hold.

I don't remember what I did after I left the cafeteria. Maybe I
went to play piano, as I so often did that year. Maybe I climbed
a loquat tree, to be more alone than I already was. Or maybe I
simply wandered the dusty roads, searching, searching, searching
for something with no name, searching aimlessly and
indiscriminately, searching without a real hope of finding
whatever it was. I don't remember. But I do remember that, by the
time seven o'clock curfew rolled around and I went home to my
dorm, I was vaguely but thoroughly incensed. The fury's fever had
begun.

My rage simmered patiently, waiting for an opening. Dorm-mates
arrived, showers were taken (though not by me; I stayed in my
filthy jeans and shirt and skin), the mayhem of evening came and
passed and finally everyone settled in at their desks for
homework hour.

I sat obediently at my desk like the others but did not work, as
my one-foot desk was covered in six inches of paper and junk, and
besides, I did not feel much like working. I rarely did. My
backpack sat unopened beside me. The cold stone floor stung my
bare feet horribly, so I ignored them. That was how I dealt with
most of life's unpleasentries. Unless, of course, they were too
cold or too hot or too large or too sharp to ignore. My fury was
all those things, and here, now, it at last made itself
unignorable.

My fevered rage spoke; I, its frozen, captive audience, listened.
It whispered to me of doubt, of insecurity, of betrayal by the
supposedly Constant and Unchanging One, of all the crimes and
injustices done to me in the past two years. Its ice burned me.
And it injected into my soul capacity for Deepest Doubt where
there had been none before: that is, doubt in a Creator God at
all. (It had been doing this for days, weeks even; now the
disease was simply breaking out into its full array of symptoms.)
I felt a prayer, a Final Prayer, spinning itself on my tongue; I
searched, found, seized a battered cardboard square left over
from a depleted pad of paper, and a pen, to unwind that
prayer.

The cardboard is long since lost - I do not know if it even
survived the semester - and the words escape my memory, but I do
recall the gist of what I wrote down. It was, simply, an
ultimatum. God, prove You are real by - [here I
hesitated, with Matthew 3:7 in my mind, but then I carried on] -
by three o'clock tomorrow, or I will stop believing in
You.

I meant it.

God, being God, answered my demand within the deadline and it was
wonderful, good, fantastic, et cetera ad nauseum, and I'm sure
you could more or less write the rest of the story. But the rest
of it is, in a sense, unimportant. The real importance of the
story is its central conflict, Doubt, and the fact that Doubt has
still got a hold on me. It is like malaria; once you contract it,
it stays in your body, in your blood, pulsing through your veins,
rushing through your heart and lungs and brain a million times a
day, waiting for a single tiny trigger to resurface and wreak
havoc upon your life. So it is with me. I recovered from the
initial infection, but I never became well. Even today I am not
well. In fact, I am showing symptoms all over again.

My faith is weak. If you were to ask me why I believe in the
Christian God, I would sit silent for several minutes, quietly
defeating every one of my own arguments, before answering your
question with a simple, "I don't know." If you were to look at my
life, your eyes would strain themselves trying to find God in it.
And if you were to ask me, "Have you seriously considered atheism
in the last six months?" I would say, "Yes."

Doubt is like malaria in another way. If you live in Africa, then
you will at some point contract malaria. You
will retain the disease for no less than seven years.
And you will be changed as a person by it. So it is with
doubt: if you are a human, then you will go through
doubt's fevers and chills and you will carry its virus
inside you for years - if not decades - and it will
change you. To say my present struggles with doubt would not have
happened if I had not experienced doubt in seventh grade is
ridiculous. I was bound to doubt at some point. I am simply
saying that, for me, seventh grade was the point of contraction.